National Post (National Edition)
FORMER RUSSIAN AGENT CRITICALLY ILL IN U.K., POISONING SUSPECTED.
WERE FORMER SOVIET-ERA SPY AND HIS DAUGHTER POISONED?
LONDON • It’s a spy drama — and it’s real. An aging Russian double agent found slumped beside his daughter on a park bench in a quiet English town, both near death, apparently poisoned. Now Scotland Yard is on the case.
Britain’s counterterrorism investigators on Tuesday took over the investigation into what caused a balding, former Soviet-era spy, 66-year-old Sergei Skripal, to collapse on Sunday, leaving him staring into space, beside his comatose daughter, 33-year-old Yulia.
The pair remain in critical condition in a Salisbury hospital.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson cautioned Tuesday that it would be “wrong to pre-judge” the fast-moving investigation, but warned that if Russia was found to be responsible, the British government would respond “robustly.”
The circumstances — two people, both in critical condition just minutes after they appear healthy and ambling past a CCTV security camera — immediately rang red bells in security circles.
The ex-spy Skripal was, according to neighbours, living a quiet life in Salisbury. But he was a man with a past. He had enemies.
Skripal was jailed in Russia in 2006 after he was convicted of passing the names of Russian intelligence agents working undercover in Europe to MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service.
In 2010, he was handed over to Britain as one of four prisoners released by Moscow in exchange for 10 Russian sleeper agents living in the United States.
The high-profile spy swap took place on an airport tarmac in Vienna, like something out of a Cold War John LeCarre novel.
The strange doings in Salisbury also immediately called to mind the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, who died in a London hospital three weeks after drinking tea laced with a mysterious radioactive substance.
In 2016, a 300-page British government inquiry found that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “probably approved” the killing of Litvinenko, who was an outspoken critic of the Kremlin and a former KGB operative.
In a statement Tuesday, Wiltshire Police said Skripal and his daughter were in intensive care, being treated for “suspected exposure to an unknown substance.”
The police added that a member of the emergency services who helped with the incident also remained in the hospital. Authorities were sweeping nearby sites — a restaurant and a pub — for forensic evidence.
“It’s a very unusual case, and the critical thing is to get the bottom of its causes as quickly as possible,” said Mark Rowley, head of counterterrorism policing in the United Kingdom.
“We’re doing all the things you would expect us to do. We’re speaking to witnesses. We’re taking forensic samples at the scene. We’re doing toxicology work, and that will help us to get to an answer,” he said.
The Russian president’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters Tuesday that the Kremlin knew nothing at all about the case and was ready to co-operate in the investigation if asked.
“We know that this tragic situation has happened, yet we have no information about its probable causes, what this man has been doing, and what this is about,” Peskov said.
He described any accusations against Russia as predictable and “not long in coming.”
The British counterterrorism chief, Rowley, said that no one was rushing toward judgment — that Russians living in England die all the time of natural causes — but that the special circumstance raised troubling questions.
“There are deaths which attract attention,” Rowley said. “I think we have to remember that Russian exiles are not immortal, they do all die and there can be a tendency for some conspiracy theories. But likewise we have to be alive to the fact of state threats, as illustrated by the Litvinenko case.”
Putin supporters said the Skripal affair was an attempt to stir anti-Russian sentiment ahead of the March 18 presidential election in Russia.
The two Russians whom Britain accused of being behind the 2006 Litvinenko murder were never charged; instead, they have thrived. Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun both deny involvement in Litvinenko’s killing.
“The Britons suffer from phobias,” Lugovoy, a former KGB bodyguard who is now a member of Russian parliament, told the Interfax news agency on Tuesday. “If something happens to a Russian, they immediately start looking for a Russian trail.”
Kovtun, a businessman, predicted that the British authorities would pursue “an anti-Russian scenario,” as he claims they did in investigating Litvinenko’s death.
“If someone did poison Skripal, if this is not just an accident, then, of course, this is a provocation by British special services aimed primarily at discrediting Russian government bodies in the run-up to the presidential election,” Kovtun told Interfax.
Litvinenko’s wife, Marina, said in an interview that seeing television footage of investigators wearing hazardous materials suits brought back painful memories.
“I had hoped it never would happen again, and when I saw those pictures of special suits, of course it was quite difficult to believe it might happen again,” she said.
She praised the police for launching an investigation immediately — they waited 2½ weeks in her case, she said — but said that if this is shown to be an assassination attempt by Russia, it would point to enduring vulnerabilities.
“Because it did happen to another Russian person, it shows lessons were not learned and people asking for protection, for political asylum or refugees or even this guy, who was exchanged, they can’t be safe, can’t be protected,” she said.
Skripal kept a low profile in Britain until Sunday afternoon, when a member of the public rang the police, concerned about the welfare of two people on a bench. Eyewitnesses who saw the pair said they didn’t look well.
It seemed as if they had taken “something quite strong,” Freya Church told the BBC.
“On the bench there was a couple, an older guy and a younger girl. She was sort of leaned in on him. It looked like she had passed out, maybe. He was doing some strange hand movements, looking up to the sky.”